Maponics Adds GreatSchools Ratings and Reviews As Partnership Grows

Maponics strengthens their position as the industry leader in school boundaries with the addition of more GreatSchools data to their offerings, facilitating even deeper insight into school performance.

“Our continuing and enhanced partnership with GreatSchools allows us to strengthen our complete school solution for our real estate clients,” said Mark Friend, Maponics Vice President of Sales & Business Development.

White River Junction, Vermont (PRWEB) January 09, 2014

Maponics, a leading provider of location-based data, announced today that it has enhanced its partnership with GreatSchools, the respected education and parenting website.

Since 2010, Maponics has offered a comprehensive, accurate, locally sourced and continuously updated School Boundaries product that includes school attendance zones, school districts and school points. Now, customers can purchase the GreatSchools data along with Maponics School Boundaries product.

GreatSchools, the established leader in helping families with education data, provides school ratings as well as detailed reviews by parents, teachers and students, a compelling feature for many consumers.

In addition, Maponics’ and GreatSchools’ datasets are easily integrated with each other. This enables real estate portals using GreatSchools ratings and reviews to enrich their offerings with Maponics School Boundaries with a minimum of technical challenges, and vice versa.

“Our continuing and enhanced partnership with GreatSchools allows us to strengthen our complete school solution for our real estate clients,” said Mark Friend, Maponics Vice President of Sales & Business Development. “Maponics’ school boundary data works seamlessly with GreatSchools’ information, enabling us to meet the needs of even more real estate business applications.”

Maponics’ partnership with GreatSchools dates to July 2012, when GreatSchools launched a mapping tool of interactive school ratings and attendance zones featuring Maponics School Boundaries. This allowed GreatSchools’ visitors to see school locations, attendance zone boundaries, district lines, ratings and reviews for all nearby schools on one map. The partnership, said Maponics CEO Darrin Clement, married the two “best in class” datasets to help millions of parents plan for their children’s future.

“GreatSchools works to bring parents the best information, so they can find higher-performing schools that are a great fit for their children,” said GreatSchools Founder and CEO Bill Jackson. “We’re excited to work with Maponics to make our ratings and reviews more widely available to parents and real estate professionals.”

In an August 2013 study by Realtor.com, three out of five home buyers said that school boundaries affect their decision to buy a home, a study cited in the “NAR Field Guide: Schools and the Home Buying Decision.” The study also shows that many parents are willing to pay more or sacrifice amenities – like more square footage or a larger yard – to buy a property in an area served by top-ranked schools.

While school district data has been widely available for years, it has proved problematic to home buyers because school districts can have hundreds of school attendance zones, each tied to individual schools of varying quality. Typically, the school attendance zone determines the public school a student will attend, not the school district.

In 2010, Maponics addressed this problem with its launch of School Boundaries, the first commercial GIS dataset to include school attendance zone boundaries in addition to school districts and school points. This enabled parents to identify the particular school their child would attend if they bought a certain home.

In addition to locally sourced school attendance zones for 82% of the US student population and 85% of the US high school population, this dataset features school district boundaries covering 100% of the US student population, as well as public and private school locations and profiles. Maponics also lists each school’s GreatSchools ID, for easy integration with the GreatSchools rating system.

"Which school a child will attend is a critical concern for parents choosing a new home,” said Friend. “The combination of Maponics School Boundaries and GreatSchools data gives parents a complete picture and enables them to make the best choice for their family."

About Maponics
Maponics is the market leader for comprehensive geospatial datasets that underpin today's location-based services and analytics. Maponics creates, publishes and updates geographic files for the areas that define where people spend their time and money, such as Neighborhood Boundaries, ZIP Code Boundaries and School Boundaries. Maponics’ customers include many of today's best-known web, social media and real estate brands, including over 70% of the top real estate websites. The company is headquartered in Vermont. For additional information, visit http://www.maponics.com.

About GreatSchools

Founded in 1998, GreatSchools is a national nonprofit that helps millions of parents find great schools, support great learning, and guide their kids to great futures. The Webby award–winning website GreatSchools.org is the nation’s leading guide to preK–12 schools, with profiles of 200,000 public and private schools and more than one million ratings and reviews by parents, teachers and students. In addition, GreatSchools.org offers thousands of articles, videos and worksheets to help parents support their children’s learning. Last year, GreatSchools reached 50 million people, including half of all U.S. families with school-age children. Headquartered in San Francisco, GreatSchools has local programs and offices in Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Washington, DC.

Maponics and/or other noted Maponics-related products contained herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Maponics, LLC. All other registered and unregistered trademarks herein are the sole property of their respective owners.